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Our podcast this week facilities completely on a tantalizing topic: Synthetic intelligence in biotech. Give it a pay attention. Additionally, Moderna’s RSV vaccine efficacy appears lackluster in comparison with opponents, and the Bernie Sanders drug pricing song-and-dance didn’t appear to faze pharma CEOs.
The necessity-to-know this morning:
- Metagenomi, a gene modifying startup, raised $94 million in an preliminary public providing.
Has AI actually solved biology?
What can machines train us about drugs? And what’s a digital twin? We cowl all that and extra this week on “The Readout LOUD,” STAT’s biotech podcast.
It’s our all-AI episode. First, STAT’s Casey Ross joins us to elucidate his reporting on how researchers and pharmaceutical companies are utilizing the know-how to search out new drug targets, design therapies, and enhance medical trials. Then, we discuss to Joel Dudley, a associate on the enterprise agency Innovation Endeavors, about the right way to discern promising concepts from wastes of time in relation to AI in biotech.
Hear right here.
The Bernie Sanders Pricing Present
In a standing room-only listening to, Sen. Bernie Sanders gathered pharma CEOs to debate prescription drug pricing. Merck CEO Robert Davis, Johnson & Johnson CEO Joaquin Duato, and Bristol Myers Squibb CEO Chris Boerner have been among the many chief executives in attendance. The occasion was fairly flashy, STAT’s Rachel Cohrs writes, with the intention of drawing public consideration to the problem.
However there have been few new concepts about the right way to assist sufferers pay much less for his or her medicines, and features of questioning fell brief: For example, when Sanders requested Boerner of BMS whether or not the corporate would decrease the value of Eliquis within the U.S. to match the value it expenses in Canada, the reply was a non-starter: “Senator, we are able to’t make that dedication primarily as a result of the costs in these two nations have very totally different methods,” Boerner replied.
To which the panel’s high Republican, Sen. Invoice Cassidy (La.), stated he didn’t “need this committee to show right into a CEO whack-a-mole.”
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Awaiting knowledge on Gritstone’s personalised most cancers vaccine
We’ll quickly study extra about how a personalised most cancers vaccine from Gritstone Bio carried out in Section 2 research to deal with an “immunologically chilly” type of colon most cancers. These neoantigen vaccines are tailor-made to show a affected person’s personal T cells the right way to acknowledge mutated most cancers proteins particular to a person’s most cancers — and kill them. This specific vaccine is focusing on micro satellite-stable colon most cancers, a sort of tumor that’s proof against immunotherapies.
STAT’s Adam Feuerstein takes a take a look at what we’d see popping out of the trial. Buyers stay “cautious” and “unsure” concerning the outcomes — which is mirrored within the firm’s $200 million market worth — but when Gritstone reveals that its most cancers vaccine works, the upside might be dramatic.
Learn extra.
Does Moderna’s RSV vaccine lose efficacy quicker than others?
Analysts at Cowan took a take a look at follow-up knowledge from Moderna’s Section 3 mRNA vaccine trial for RSV, and located that its efficacy dwindles quicker than vaccines made by GSK and Pfizer. Particularly, they level out, the vaccine noticed a 25% decline in efficacy after 8.6 months, whereas GSK noticed a 7% decline after 14 months. The endpoints are totally different, however the analysts “are involved it might negatively have an effect on [Moderna’s RSV vaccine] if confirmed with extra knowledge.”
Preliminary knowledge from Moderna, it ought to be famous, confirmed that within the first six months its experimental vaccine was simply as efficient as GSK’s, and maybe extra so than Pfizer’s. The CDC will convene an advisory committee on February 28 and focus on Moderna’s vaccine candidate.
Extra reads
- Kyverna’s $319 million upsized IPO is newest in surge of biotechs going public, BioSpace
- Home passes ban on use of QALYs in federal well being applications, Endpoints
- Adverum’s gene remedy reduces therapy burden in moist AMD, however questions stay, FierceBiotech
